Kate Winslet as Hanna Schmitz in The Reader

Best Actress at the 81st Annual Oscars (2008)

Notable Quote:

“You don’t matter enough to upset me.”

Synopsis:

Michael Berg (David Kross) is a teenager in post-WWII Germany when he meets Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), and they have a lovely relationship where he reads to her and nothing bad happens 😊 Okay, fine, she has sex with him on numerous occasions, and Michael finds out years later that she was a Nazi, and she basically hangs like a millstone around his neck for his entire fucking life.

The character:

Oh my god, fuck Hanna Schmitz, seriously. First of all, can you say “creep”!? She’s a thirty-something year-old woman and while that’s not old enough to be our main character’s mother, as some waitress believes she is (side eye to that lady), it’s far, faaaar too old to be dating a FIFTEEN-year-old. Fifteen! The movie has such a weird attitude towards it too, it vaguely seems to think it’s inappropriate, but doesn’t really get the level of fucked upedness going on. I’m not even against the idea that relationships can get complicated and blur boundaries, but Hanna is manipulative and emotionally terrorizes Michael and he never really gets over it, and just saying, if it was a man doing this to a teenage girl, we wouldn’t be like, ooh, how intriguing that this older lady is introducing him to sex.

Luckily, that’s the worst thing about Hanna 😊 Oh wait, except for the fact that she was a fucking Nazi guard at Auschwitz!!?! Because that’s what this story needed, Nazis. As I said long ago in my entry on The Iron Lady, it’s all good if you wanna focus on evil historical characters, but you’ve gotta do something with it, you know? Hanna never really seems to be that bothered by her crimes, she makes this pitiful, cowardly attempt at amends at the end of her life, and maybe that’s the point, but if so, the movie does a bad job conveying it.

I haven’t even gotten to Hanna’s deepest, darkest secret which is :duh duh duh: that she can’t read? Lmao, it is just as stupid as it sounds, early in the movie, I jokingly said to myself, “can this bitch not read?” but it turns out that she literally can’t, which is why she makes Michael read to her, something she also did with her prisoners in the concentration camp. Completely unclear why she can’t read or why she’d literally rather cop to letting three hundred people die in a fire, but go off sis. There’s maybe some sort of connection between reading and being a Nazi war criminal but lord help me if I know what it is.

The performance:

This award is very much of the “oh shit, Kate Winslet doesn’t have an Oscar yet?” variety. I should say, I actually really like Winslet and generally find her to be a charming, good actress, and she does a decent job here, but it’s a shitty role that no one would be able to transcend. Like, her German accent is good, she cries when she should and it feels believable, she does everything required of her: I just feel bleh about it all. I will say, in addition to her lovely Nazi/pedophile aspects, Hanna is generally a cold, sour woman, so Winslet mainly gets to do a lot of scowling and grimacing. It’s all very grim and uptight and ultimately, just not that enjoyable or moving.

I will bash, however, on the make up artists, who do a terrible job making Winslet old later on in the film. She is supposed to be in her sixties, and she literally looks like a fairy tale witch out of Into the Woods or something! Do the people who made this movie just not understand age?? Do they think that there are old people and young people, and that’s the amount of variation?

The movie:

The Reader is the type of movie that we’ve encountered before in this column: it’s reaching so hard for something interesting but ultimately ends up grabbing a handful of dead air. Nominally, it could be about understanding the nature of evil, but that’s not actually something that comes across. It tries to connect things that aren’t connected: Nazis to sexual abuse to illiteracy. It’s also a Holocaust movie that isn’t about Jews, because it’s fun to pretend to grapple with dark shit from history without actually having to think about anything too dark. And on top of all that, it’s drab and dull to look at, no personal aesthetic whatsoever. I’ve really enjoyed ranting about it though, so that’s one point in its favor!

Was the Oscar deserved?

Nope, but we missed giving it to her for Titanic or Eternal Sunshine, so here we are.